Back in the days I used to be a Riven main, bought all the skins and played her every single game. Lately I’ve gotten a lot of requests to make a guide for Riven, and I’ve finally done it. The guide explains you how to play Riven in general (how to use combos and basic mechanics), how to play the laning phase and how to teamfight. If there are any additional questions, feel free to ask them below.

Riven is a very versatile champion with insane damage output and a ton of mobility. When played well, you can destroy anyone on lane with this champion. So therefore, I will teach you how to play Riven and how to destroy people with it.

In the guide we will be talking about a couple of things. First of all we’ll go over her basic mechanics. Then we’ll talk about the ways you can combine combo’s to execute them faster.

When you know how she works and how to use her skills effectively we’ll cover laning and teamfighting.

So without further a do, let’s get started with her mechanics.

Riven’s passive adds additional bonus damage onto your auto attacks after using a skill. This can charge this up to 3 times. To make good use of this passive, you should always try to auto attack your enemy between skills to make sure you deal the most amount of damage.

Riven’s Q steps forward and slashes everything in front of her. This skill can be used 3 times in a row within a 4 second cooldown. The third slash knocks your enemies up. The skill slashes towards your cursor when you are hovering over an enemy. If you are not, the skill slashes into the direction she is currently facing.

Riven’s W deals damage to everyone around her and stuns them for 0.75 seconds.

Riven’s E dashes you towards the direction of your cursor and grants you a shield that scales on your AD. The more AD you have, the more shield you’re going to get.

Riven’s ultimate grants riven a bigger sword for 15 seconds. This gives you 75 bonus attack range and 20% bonus AD during the time. Also your range of your Q and W are slightly increased.

When you have enabled your ultimate, you can use it again to shoot a cone of physical damage towards a direction. This skill deals more damage when your targets are low on health, so use it as an executional spell. It has its most increased damage when the enemy has 25% health or less.

As you can see, her skills allow you to be very mobile while still dealing a ton of damage. Let’s take a look on how to use these skills together.

Using riven’s combo’s is all about cancelling animations. This is done by quickly doing something after using a skill. For instance, you can use your Q and cancel the animation with an auto attack after that. This way you can perform your combo really fast and you have auto attacks in between for extra damage.

As main damage output I use a combo that almost doesn’t allow counterplay. Firstly, Use your E to get close to your target. Then follow it up with a Q, auto attack, q, auto attack, q, autoattack, W and walk away after the stun.

This way your shield will catch most of the incoming damage, while you deal a lot of damage. Then when your Q combo is finished we end it with a stun, that will make it easy for you to disengage without catching too much damage in return.

Then we have another nice trick that makes your combo’s execute faster. When you combine your E with a skill followed up with it, the second skill executes while you’re dashing. You can use this to engage fast, for instance by using your stun while dashing. This is almost too fast for counter play.

Remember to always try to auto attack inbetween skills for maximum damage output. This cancels animations and it gives a lot of extra damage because of her passive.

Alright, let’s go over to how to play the lane with Riven.

When the first wave comes in, try to push it a little bit. You should try to get level 2 first because then you will be able to all-in your opponent without any problems.

On level 1 you can already try to trade some damage with your opponent. Take Q first and do the Q – auto attack combo to deal a ton of damage. When your target is low and you hit level 2, you can flash on him to finish the job.

At 3 minutes ingame you should worry about junglers. Play a bit safer and place your trinket to secure you some vision.

When your opponent goes for a lasthit you can strike by doing the combo I said earlier, where you use your E-Q combo to initiate, and finish it with a stun to walk away unharmed.

At level 6 you can do an all-in again. Use your ultimate before you go in, and try to kill him. Even if you don’t entirely kill him but you get him low it’s all good. Push the wave in, get another wave and go back.

Keep pressuring your opponent. Riven is one of the best duelists in the game so when played correctly you should be winning most of the trades.

Everytime you have your ultimate up, try to make use of it. The cooldown is relatively low as you level the skill up and it forces your opponent out of lane most of the time. When he recalls, push hard.

Are you ahead on lane and you’re getting ganked? No problem. With riven you are able to 1v2 people thanks to her insane AOE damage. You almost deal the same amount of damage to both players, so you should be able to take them on. When you are ahead it is often the best strategy to push really hard.

Splitpushing with Riven is probably the best strategy if you want to win your game. Force their entire team top all the time, keep pressuring and make plays. You should have a couple of wards in their jungle to make sure you’re not getting ganked by 3 or more people, because that situation is hard to win. Then it’s best to just walk away.

Teamfighting with Riven is a bit harder. Usually you’re pretty squishy and when they stun you 1 time you’re dead, so it’s crucial to have a guardian angel before you try to fight, unless you are a tank riven. When you have guardian angel, dive for the squishies on their team and oneshot them. Deal as much damage as you can before you die, because your team will be the cleanup crew from that point on. It is best to have flash up before engaging a fight with Riven.

You can also try a more safe way of teamfighting, which focusses on protecting your carries. Stay in the backline and kill everyone who gets close to your carries. Assassins especially are easy to kill this way.

You will figure out yourself what you like the best. I know Riven’s who like to go for a tanky riven, while I really dislike playing that kind of Riven. I’d rather to a ton of damage and make plays with that. It’s what you choose, so for item builds I recommend you to figure it out yourself and look at one of the Solomid’s guides. I will link a few in the description.

Also for runes and masteries you can have a look in the description. I am not specialized on that area and I often use the ones they tell me to use in written guides on Solomid.

I hope this has helped you to understand Riven. If you wish to play Riven like a boss I strongly recommend you to watch BoxBox’s his streams. He inspired me to play Riven because of his amazing mechanics. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comment section below.